In this blog, the Alliance’s Jonathan Breckon discusses how an ‘evidence-informed’ approach can bridge the gap between research and practice. How do we decide what works? Teachers, police officers, social workers, healthcare professionals and many...

  In this guest blog, Simon Burall, Director of Involve, explores the need for the What Works centres to strike a balance between generating more hard evidence which is better communicated to frontline practitioners, and for...

  In this guest blog, Derrick Johnstone, author of the Alliance’s latest report, Squaring the Circle, develops the evidence discussion from the need for more robust standards of evidence and evaluation to explore the need to...

  Research synthesis will be at the heart of the Government’s new What Works centres, however conducting systematic research reviews is often a lengthy and time consuming process and consequently, difficult to juggle with policy development....

  An inspiration for the “What Works” centres has been the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).  However, NICE itself is changing and will be doing more in the social care field.  April 2013...

  We’ve been advocating for some time that governments should take evidence more seriously. Where possible, data should be opened up to public scrutiny, and policies should be tested to see whether they actually work. The...

  Getting evidence into everyday practice is a hard nut to crack. Computerised decision support tools  to help doctors use evidence at point-of-care have been rather hit and miss (and mostly miss).  It’s also not always...

  Social research should be making society better. Chief Executive of NatCen Social Research, Penny Young, explores why this isn’t happening enough and what we can learn from other research disciplines.   Reflecting on the contribution of...